Fedora 11 on the Eee PC 1000 (Article)

I've written a new article, this time to Linux Gazette. It's been almost 10 years since I've written something for them, it felt good to be back.

Virtualization With KVM On A Fedora 11 Server

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Fedora 11 (Leonidas) on the Eee PC 1000

Fedora 11 (Leonidas) on the Eee PC 1000
Originally uploaded by afsilva

I just installed Fedora 11 on my Eee PC 1000. This time, for a change, I decided to go with KDE instead of GNOME.


I am really enjoying it so far.


I've already addressed some of the existing issues on getting Fedora 11 to work on the Eee PC 1000.


The only other issue, I will add is getting the 'tap-to-click' enabled with your touchpad. Fedora 11 (Live version) does not seem to generate a xorg.conf, so what I did to enable this setting was to add a shell script under $HOME/.kde/Autostart/ with the following content:

synclient TapButton1=1 TapButton2=3 TapButton3=2

The value for each button represents the number of fingers touching the pad.

That will enable 'tap-to-click' every time you login.

Update 1: As always pulseaudio is causing me problems. I could not get my sound to work at all on KDE 4.2. The solution was to remove pulseaudio, and everything worked fine.

Setting up ssh to create a transparent tunnel through a bastion server

You need to ssh into server on given network (or environment) at work.

The 'manual' way:

ssh bastion.server (once you logged in, you login to the actual server you trying to get to)
ssh final.destination.server

An easier way:

ssh -t bastion-server ssh -t final.destination.server

With ssh ProxyCommand:

Edit your .ssh/config:

Host bastion
Hostname bastion.server
User your_username

Host final-host
ProxyCommand ssh -q -a -x bastion nc final.destination.server 22

Note: The bastion server needs the nc command installed for this to work.

Now, you can:

ssh final-host

or

scp somefile final-host:/tmp

Picasa 3 on Fedora 11

You won't be able to login to your picasa web on Fedora 11 using Picasa 3, unless you install openssl-devel:

yum install openssl-devel

Fedora 11 (Preview Release) on Eee PC 1000

Here's a quick list of the good and the bad of Fedora 11 (Preview Release) on the Eee PC 1000.

The bad:

1. The wireless drivers till have to be downloaded and compiled from http://www.rpmfusion.org

a. Install Repo

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm'

b. Install drivers (as root):

yum install akmod-rt2860

c. Reboot Eee PC twice. Once to build the drivers (automatically), second to load drivers (automatically).

2. PulseAudio volume control SUCKS!!! You lose control over the different channels and the sound on the Eee PC comes out much slower than usual.

a. The workaround (less than optimal):

alsamixer -c0

3. Mouse clicks with touchpad is disabled by default.

a. The workaround:

On Gnome go to System -> Preferences -> Mouse. Choose the 'Touchpad' tab, and click on 'Enable mouse clicks with touchpad'

The good:

1. Compared to F10, the biggest improvement on my Eee PC 1000 has been suspend/resume feature. It actually works 100% of the time now. And NetworkManager restores the connection really really fast!

2. All other parts of the Eee PC work out of the box.

following symlinks with tar

tar -cvfh somedirectory.tar somedirectory/

Note 1: -h allows tar to follow symlink
Note 2: it seems trying to gzip it with -z flag doesn't work when invoking -h
Note 3: This assumes there are symlinks under somedirectory/

Fixing Fedora 11 Beta Live so it will boot

If you are getting a grey screen when trying to boot Fedora 11 beta from a usb stick, there is a simple work around for it:

> Open the syslinux.cfg file on your usb stick
> then in syslinux.cfg change 'default vesamenu.c32' to 'default linux0'.

Source: Red Hat's Bugzilla.

facebook chat on pidgin

On Fedora:

yum install purple-facebookchat

and then set up an account like any other protocol.

Creating small samples of mysql dbs or tables

Table samples from a DB:

mysqldump --opt --where="true LIMIT 1000000" mydb > mydb1M.sql

Sample from 1 table:

mysqldump --opt --where="true LIMIT 1000000" mydb mytable > mydb_mytable_1M.sql

Source: http://www.ducea.com/2009/03/17/howto-get-a-small-sample-dataset-from-a-mysql-database-using-mysqldump/